Carole Russell Art Weblog

Joy of painting

No I don’t mean Bob Ross!

No, MY joy of painting over the weekend on a commission has been compounded by the person I am painting the commission for who has just remarked “Awesome” on seeing the latest update.

Wow, how pleased am I? There is no better feeling than someone agreeing that you have captured a subject well and there is no worse feeling than a bad critique of what you consider a good work. Luckily that didn’t happen to me today.

Have to keep from banging my big head on the door frames now!

It has been a struggle but all struggles are worth it if the end result is good. My main struggle was painting two girls – full length in bikinis with sunglasses on. The skin tones were an issue, the face shapes underneath the glasses were troublesome too.

On the skin front, I decided to paint there whole bodies in a pale flesh colour and gradually build up a tanned look with glazes of burnt umber and it seems to have worked. I also decided to give the girls a very very thin outline using a mix of flesh, burnt umber, raw umber, red ochre and ultramarine, it really helped to stand them out on the canvas.

The face shape was easy for one of the girls as she lives on our street, the other girl was different. She looked nothing like the sketches I had done so I asked for some other photos of her without sunglasses. This really helped as I could study her face shape and I also managed to add a smile to her face (she wasn’t really smiling in the other photo.

Should have it finished in another week – so I’ll post a link to it.

By the way it’s acrylic on 24 x 18 inch deep edge canvas